Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?
Specifically, what did you think was plausible and what did you think was around the corner (even if either really never came to fruition)?
1) We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. Many of us were ignorant of single-core performance scaling and the memory wall issues. I want to be clear: Computer Architects were warning people about this in the early 90s but many ignored their inconvenient truth.
2) 2D GUIs would evolve into 3D GUIs - maybe VR? Maybe something else? And the CLI would be gone
3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs
4) Microsoft taking over and Unix dying
5) All programming would be object-oriented (We are talking 90s style definition here)
I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.
In the 90s and 00s, every company with more than 1-2000 employees would have an internal dev staff. I worked in some companies with 20 devs, some with half a dozen, but there was always a dev team in the IT group.
Today, companies do low code via SharePoint and Salesforce. The do BI with Tableau and Power BI instead of internal BI teams. Their external web presence is done with Wordpress instead of a custom site. Sprinkle in some SaaS, and the internal dev teams of corporations are way smaller than they used to be, with some companies not having any internal devs.
I expected IPv6 to be adopted quickly.
I expected 6GB to be more storage than I could ever fill.
I expected Windows to be quickly dismissed and Unix to become the standard.
I expected to have a screen built into my glasses by now.
I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted.
We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well.
In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel.
It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.
When I was a kid my dad refused to teach me to program, he thought it would be a useless skill to learn because he believed in the future there would be no more programmers, as everyone would be able to program anything they wanted through drag and drop interfaces.
I don't get that. Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end — transistors can't be smaller than one atom across. I feel like "everyone" did know that, even in the 90s. Or, at least, it was mentioned in every explanation of Moore's law itself.
> Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs
I mean, they did, but they also created consultant jobs to replace the ones they took away. See: Salesforce.
The need to write source code can be taken away; but the need to do requirements analysis and deliberate architectural design cannot. So you end up with people who do 80% of a programmers' job, except for the coding part.
this is still something some of us think about today
I think it's safe to say that we were close with this one, with jetbrains java (awt / swing) and wpf / winforms visual studio.
Then dot com, mobile and responsiveness arrived.
And it did kinda for a while.
It only did not happened because they messed up with UNIX subsystem on Windows NT/2000.
Those that give Apple money to develop GNU/Linux software would be just as happy with the POSIX subsystem.
During the 00s and early 10s, it felt like it is.
IMHO that didn't happen, the integration morass remained, and I'd consider much of that model a failure in retrospect.
On the infrastructure front, I seem to remember a lot of talk about Frame Relay (EDIT: actually I was thinking of ATM, thanks for correction below). And fiber installs all over the place, lots of money in getting fiber into downtown areas, etc. Also I don't think people really predicted the possibility of the dominance of the "cloud" as it is now, really. I mean, hosting services were I'm sure a growth market but "serious" companies were seen as wanting to have their own DCs, and I don't recall major talk or trend away from that until the mid 2000s ("SaaS" etc. became the buzzword around then, too).
Also JavaScript as a serious presentation layer system wasn't much talked about until the 2000s.
In one sense it failed because all it ever saves you is the typing. You still have to learn the whole model, sometimes it is like learning a programming language from scratch.
On the other hand, it may have succeeded. Objects don't exist in isolation but as a library with other objects and frameworks, and APIs are basically object models. You could think of React or the stripe api as object universes.
What is interesting is that you can't sell a developer product like a commercial products. Developers need access to the code so you either make it open source, and sell consulting, or else you make it a web api and rent it out.
Open source killed it all.
I still re-read this every few years: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
"How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone.
Haha, I forgot IPhone was a trademark before the iPhone.
Yes and:
Executable architectural models & designs.
Round tripping, models to code and back. (aka two-way translation?)
We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-...
I was so naive...
The problem is something else. The problem is that the internet is more than one thing. It is a couch for the lazy, a distraction for the procrastinator, a massive entertainment delivery device; and most of the monetary value of the internet doesn't come from it being a bicycle for the mind, but for the other things.
Not everyone chooses to ride on the bicycle. Instead of, say, reading Wikipedia, they read Infowars. The world would be a much better place if a lot of people spent their time reading Wikipedia (with all of its faults) instead of scrolling Twitter, Facebook, and slanted news sites like Breitbart, CNN, Fox, etc. etc. etc.
As a 90's kid who grew up online, this was my thought at the time as well. Turns out computers were more like an op-amp for the existing inadequacies of human nature, rather than a bicycle for the mind.
Most published research is false even if it's peer-reviewed, and it may be better to leave it to people who read it full time and understand it's an ongoing conversation.
I admit that I too was once a believer...
Fast-forward today, most of the people I know who were in electronic have switched to software.
They all had to learn to code in school and had background domain knowledge in some specialty. In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes.
As the years played out it normalized between the two groups as each filled in their own weak spots with experience. But in those early days I was pretty jealous.
Yeah. Going to school for Computer Science is probably the biggest regret in my life. I could have spent that time & money learning something useful/interesting instead, or better yet, not waste my time in University at all.
I still don't entirely understand why it turns out to be so hard to outsource. I get some of it, but it seems like something that we should have figured out by now. I'll be interested to see what the post-pandemic shift to remote work does for that.
Didn’t listen since I loved programming and computers and it worked out well for me.
I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend. When you actually looked into the supposed outsourcing "trend", all you heard about was TheDailyWTF-grade horror stories.
Everything is already created. They would download movies, music, and games with BitTorrent and chat with ICQ and IRC. What else is there to create?
I should go into administration, because that's where the big money is.
The field to look at was cognitive science or neurology, which in fairness makes some sense given where machine learning is today.
Today, people are trying to get into tech companies, and those who take one boot camp course call themselves “software engineers.”
In the early 1990s, it sure felt like there was a limited market for robotics, machine learning, AI, etc. It was mostly industrial robotics and assembly line inspection cameras.
No educated person in the late 90s could have anticipated how Foxconn would obviate "electronics."
No one knew what the internet really was and what it would become. Not Bill Gates, not anyone else.
Developers believed that processing power, RAM, storage etc. would continue to grow exponentially to the point where there would just be too much of it and we wouldn't need to care about any resource constraints when writing code.
Writing code line by line in a text editor was supposedly on its way out, to be replaced by fancy IDEs, WYSIWYG, UML etc.
All the jobs were supposed to go to India. Programming as a profession has always been on the brink of death for one reason or another, and yet here we are.
I was pretty excited about it too... And I was a kid in the 90s. I once worked with a guy who got excited about new releases of directx... Which I also admit could be a little exciting
In the 90s, not getting an expensive new PC every 2 years or so meant you were screwed if you wanted to play any of the cool new games coming out. I haven't upgraded my system in over 5 years, and I can still play most new titles with a few minor graphic settings turned down or off.
If you're using something like Visual Studio then that's is a very fancy IDE and a long long way from writing C in a text editor and dealing with arcane compile errors.
Didnt Bill Gates send a memo to MS employees in the 90's that internet is going to be very important and they have to take it seriously.
1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat.
2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.
The 90s was peak desktop. Everything was on the local hard drive.
Now everything is back on the mainframe(cloud) i fully expect it to cycle back to the desktop in some form. (we just won’t call it that)
Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME.
I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.
I thought all I ever really did was VS Code, so I got code-server installed and everything else was mostly online anyway (Office 365, Exchange, Wordpress, etc), but the biggest pain point was the lack of a native terminal and ssh.
Even though VSCode has a great terminal built in, it seemed so wasteful to load into it just to open a terminal window.
After a couple of months, I just switched to MacOS, and still use my code-server install instead of VSCode, and 100% prefer it.
Hacker culture calls this the Wheel of Samsara.
Joke was on the proponents of this since web-apps bloated to require a damn super computer to run them with acceptable performance, until that YC/PG-backed startup that was posted on here recently came along selling mainframe-hosted-browsers-as-a-service-over-VNC.
And as you say, there's definitely a cycle between "everything local" and "everything central".
Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.
The second point is true as well. No matter where the pendulum is at the moment, there are always going to be people trying to push it in the other direction. Sun was again ahead of the time by pushing the Javastation, which was trying to do what the Chromebooks are doing. Then there was the Sunray of course, which was really cool, but a bit too specialised.
The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is.
I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is no such thing as portable software (and where portable software is absolutely required, it shall run in the browser).
I thought the future was making that publishing easier. I wasn't wrong about that- twitter and facebook are easy. I just missed the consequences of "easy" becoming "walled garden."
Wikipedia is still up and running ;)
Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way, but it's sooo much easier for the average non-tech person to not self-host an email server versus using something like gmail. It's the same reason I do not own a lift for my car.. sure technically I can install a lift at my house for my car but then I have to maintain it's hydrolics and I'd only use the lift once or twice a year ... who has time for that? Especially if my thing is fixing piano's and not cars. Let the car people handle cars, let the piano people handle piano's... I think we are in the same situation with tech.
It was naive to think that just because technology progresses, society progresses too. The 20+ year Iraq and Afghanistan wars really made me realize that advanced technology meant nothing if we were going to regress morally.
We thought everything could be abstracted away into a perfect library and no duplication of functionality should ever need to occur. In the end, we could even drag and drop (or write XML) to connect all those components together.
We thought multitasking was possible and even a good thing to design for. Hence the very noisy and distracting desktop OS designs we still have today.
We thought in terms of a much smaller handful programming languages. And anything “serious” would end up in C (or C++, maaaybe Java)
We thought Apple was kind of a weird thing, surprising company that barely hung on, the computer only shown on movies.
We thought democracy “won” so the future could only be one full of enlightenment, right?
We thought CLIs were so passé and every dev tool needs a GUI.
Merges were done with a diff / merge tool and often manually.
Software libraries were bought for big $ or provided by your OS/compiler vendor, not downloaded. Maybe the “reuse” vision of the past actually WAS realized. Instead of and XML file, it’s my packages.json :).
I expected 250 gigabytes to cost less than $4000 by now. ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/19990220180309/http://www.tsrcom...
By isolation I don't mean lack of socialization of course. There was plenty of socializing back then. But the people I met on Usenet, BBS, IRC and phpBB forums were people like me. We worked on tech projects, we talked tech, we had our specific jargon and subculture.
I distinctly remember when people asked me what I wanted to do back then, I'd make up some lie, but knew that my future would be living in a single room with no social interaction but with my online friends. (I did not think this to be bad at all, this was my idea of a good life).
I thought tech would evolve to make the internet more into an alternate reality, more separate from the real world. Maybe I was reading too much cyberpunk sci-fi.
In any case, I certainly did not anticipate social media, dating apps and the digitization of traditional brick and mortar businesses. And to be honest, I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off without them.
It seems there aren't that many "pure internet" projects out there. IRC replacements are all tailored for the workplace and real life interaction (maybe except for discord?). It still feels very strange to me that communication platforms would ask your for your real name (especially when, at this point, there's more "reputation" or "social credit" or whatever you'd like to call it attached to my online persona as to my real world one).
Crypto is perhaps the last bastion of such an autarkic technology (i.e. by netizens for netizens) but even that is slowly moving toward real world asset tokenization and institutional integration.
I also thought IDEs would be in 3D, with better visualizations of code running in parallel.
And, I didn't expect web applications to be the norm for most people. I thought we'd have a better "standard" cross-platform application development approach.
One thing that doesn't surprise me are application stores. After seeing how 90s applications used to take over your computer and wedge themselves everywhere, I expected that OS vendors would lock things down a bit more tightly.
Which is at least one reason why Windows kept its crown. By the time there were real alternatives (increased popularity of Macs--albeit mostly higher end of the price range--and Linux as a fairly viable option), the desktop OS just wasn't very interesting for a lot of people. And Chromebooks were a reasonable alternative for many, especially in K-12. For those who did still need a "fat client," Windows just tended to win by default.
While we're reminiscing, the thing I remember the most from the late 90's is that it seemed no one knew what they were doing (or perhaps it was just me). The Internet opened up such a frontier in computing, for effectively hobbyists, as I guess we'll never see again. Perhaps that's why I don't recall thinking about what computing would look like in the 21st century--there was too much to be done right in front of my face!
EDIT: There's a mention or two of thin clients. I think only Sun thought that would work :).
Oh ok, I can think of one that actually worked out: Linux on commodity hardware in data centers. It became clear by 98 or so that the combination of Apache (httpd) on a bunch of cheap Linux boxen behind an expensive LB would tear down the Sun/IBM scale up model fairly easily due to both cost reduction and an improved resiliency. Of course there were MySQL bottlenecks to work through, but then memcache landed and pushed that off a cycle. Then there were the 64-bit AMD chips and a large bump in RAM density that pushed it back another. And then I guess true distributed computing landed.
And I thought that conspiracy theories were harmless fun.
And in a sense, that kind of came to pass. Nobody believes _anything_ the government says anymore, and skepticism is at all-time highs. It’s just… everything.
I also bet very heavily against the widespread popularity of video on the net, not due to any technical limitations, but simply because reading is so much faster.
* Thin clients: everybody was going to have a 'dumb terminal', and all the computing/storage would happen elsewhere. There were many variations on this idea.
* PIMs: Palm Pilots and all the variations. I knew a guy who quit his job to develop Palm Pilot wares, claiming it was 'the future'. In a way, he was right.
* Windows: Linux was barely there, Unix was for neckbeards and universities, and it looked like Mac was mostly dead. It looked like Microsoft was about to swallow the world.
* The end of mice and keyboards: Yes, it sounds silly today. but supposedly VR/voice/whatever was going to replace it all.
> Thin clients
The cloud.
> Palm pilots.
Cell phones.
> Windows, Mac, Linux
Windows is still for business/economy. Linux is still for neckbeards. Although Mac is bigger than it was, the same people are still waiting for Apple silicon to catch on.
> Keyboards and mice
Have largely been supplanted by touch or gesture and consumer VR is becoming more and more viable every day.
What's your prediction for the next 20 years?
Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.
I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top.
SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of business users, but it turned out they were still too technical and not flexible enough.
I don’t see the role of software developer/engineer going away anytime soon.
I’ve seen this with tools like Zapier. I know many non-technical people that put together amazing workflows just piecing things together with webhooks and similar tools.
COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.
This is how .net got it's crappy generic name. Back in it's early days it (and SOAP) was sold as the glue that would stitch all this together, just add a web reference and you'd have all this functionality in your project. It was incredibly disappointing to get through all this marketing and eventually realize it was just an MS version of java. Enterprise java beans, CORBA, COM and probably some others were also efforts in this direction. These days it's REST and microservices.
That's basically what Salesforce is.
I can actually see some of this happening in the crypto space. Things like MetaMask and now chainlink combining into some form of low code smart contract app tool. As you say though even in this scenario devs don’t go away.
Then the momentum shriveled up with Perl 6 and it has just become completely irrelevant. Pretty insane trajectory. It's almost as bad as like ColdFusion lol
And then we got things that were "good enough" at everything that anybody wanted a PC to do, and we went past that to silly stuff that very few people wanted a computer to do, like CueCat.
And everywhere you looked, there were new things happening. The internet. The web. MUDs. People were just trying things, and just throwing the results out there for the world to look at.
I just kind of expected more and better to keep coming. I didn't see PS/2 and IBM trying to close the ecosystem. I didn't see Windows taking over the world and then Microsoft trying to close the (web) ecosystem. I didn't see the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube silos taking over. I didn't see cancel culture taking over the diversity. I didn't see hostility, nastiness, and hatred taking over the openness and acceptance that used to be there.
Computers failed to create a space dominated by "the better angels of our nature". We not only expected it to, we tasted it. We expected it because it was what we experienced. And then it got overrun by all the worse parts of human nature that we wanted to get away from. Turns out that making people act better takes more than technology.
Ironically enough, it was free software that powered the building of the web-based world that removed power and control from users and subjected them to the unblinking eye of pervasive surveillance.
Microsoft has given up. I'm convinced that they adopted Chromium for their browser because they see Electron or something like it as the future of application development.
Thankfully Apple seems to still believe in native applications. All the interesting indie software seems to be on the Mac. Apple is trying to make speech recognition and OCR work better on-device than off. They are investing in CPUs because Intel can't figure out how to ship anymore. They still have stores where you can touch and see the stuff they sell. It's the most human big tech company out there right now. It might be the only one.
I expected most people to be able to create and publish their own websites using desktop apps like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver, and that these types of apps would be the dominant way to create content on the web.
The pace of technology change has accelerated dramatically, the complexity of software has grown beyond imagination, and perhaps correspondingly, the fragility and interdepencency has grown out of control.
We (myself included) have become so acclimated to complex software as users that we forget how much work is buried under the surface of a "simple" app. Even accurately describing the behaviors of a system is difficult now (and often not even documented, partly because it changes so often).
When I was taking flying lessons in the 90s, I couldn't believe how antiquated and manual-intensive the aircraft systems were. There seemed to be so many places where pilots needed to follow a checklist to perform manual tasks which could have been automated based on various available data. When I asked my instructor why it was so archaic, he explained that it's a long and arduous process to get new things certified by the FAA.
This difficulty in getting advanced systems approved was mostly due to the processes and tests required to ensure a very high standard of reliability and safety, since lives were at stake. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. But seeing some of the Airbus automation problems (which cost a few aircraft and some lives), and then seeing the Boeing 737 Max disasters, I see how slower advancement, more testing, and slower release cycles can be beneficial.
But in the software world, the more modern approach is "move fast and break things". Not only is software now never complete (in contrast to when software was released once or once per n-years, on disk or CD), now it is released every 5 minutes with old bugs replaced with new bugs. There are days where every time you open an app, it needs to update first. I'm not sure this is a net improvement.
If I could say one really positive thing, it would be that tooling has gotten really nice. Even I recall when syntax highlighting arrived... and at first was laughed at. On the other hand, the better tooling is virtually required to keep up with the ballooning complexity and volume of the code we write.
I could rant and complain many more paragraphs, but it can be summarized thusly: modern software (and its development) has made some great improvements, but those improvements have been largely offset by reductions in the quality and formality of practices.
I'm not really sure what changed, though.
"...the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups."
I got it right, but with hindsight it was pretty obvious it was going to be a big thing.
More than a decade later, I finally learned how to do it. HTML+CSS+JS and a bit of PHP for WordPress. I'll never be paid a cent for this knowledge as I'm not a web designer, but it feels good to work on my own sites, just as an expression of myself, and as a hobby.
It really felt like the Internet was a fantastical place, a destination for unlimited possibilities.
I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have seen is something like WinDirStat when it comes to looking at a directory, and even that is just colored blocks. I knew the graphics processing would be intense to match the bandwidth of the human visual channel.
I did see the Wild Wild West era of the Internet coming to a close, having donned white and grey hats myself off and on. The early Internet had security holes such you could drive a bus through them honking and dragging a bunch of rusty bikes behind you. The invention of the img tag more or less began the Advertising Era, whether they knew it or not.
I did have an early suspicion about privacy, and permanence, so my Usenet posts from 1989 never had my name on them. So far this has remained a decent decision.
I did not expect a trend in programming languages I have a hard time describing but can only sum as "yes, every programming paradigm and idiom will be crammed into that language over time if allowed."
I have never expected VR to take off until other technologies are in place and cheap. They aren't here yet.
I have never expected the "Fifth Generation" anyone-can-code drag-and-drop thing to happen and I believe that by the time such a thing is available (and effective at scale), it would be AI anyway.
None of the approaches to AI have been promising to me, aside from Cyc, which I would describe as being necessary, but not sufficient.
I still think about that GUI Tom Cruise navigates in Minority Report. The film is almost 20 years old, and yet GUI design today seems to be focused on hiding more and more elements, instead of making the canvas bigger to display more info.
I thought tech would be used more for good. The 90s were an incredible era where the internet and the people using it were usually good people interested in changing the world. Now everything is a scam, or collecting information on you. In the end, all internet money flows to advertising which is just sad. It's so over-commercialized and my original hopes have long been dashed.
At least I can run Linux. That makes me happy.
They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it.
C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local) namespace root. You can find the GUID of your filesystem in diskmgmt.msc and navigate Explorer to \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ just fine. Look ma, no drive letters!
Perhaps surprisingly, despite \\?\Volume{some-guid} being the name of a Volume object, what you find under \\?\Volume{some-guid}\ is a regular filesystem of Directory and File objects.
It's as if Linux was set up such that / was a hybrid of procfs+sysfs+devfs, and all the filesystems were accessed by going to /dev/disk/by-uuid/... and navigating "into" one of the block-device nodes there.
Genuine question, trying to imagine how/why I would not want drive letters. Maybe each device should just use the uuid set by the manufacturer? But then that's too ugly to display in a file explorer.. and often I don't just have 1 partition per physical device, so multiple mount points.. and other times I have 1 mount point with multiple backing devices (mirrors/raid).
now people watch more static video content than ever and are damaged to a point where it will take a generation or two to recover if it all -- whooops
Programming environments based on something other than editing text files directly. (See the Self, Smalltalk, or Dylan environments.)
Object-oriented programming world domination. (That came true but we’re slowly recovering.)
I thought things would develop along lines that were of interest to me or which appealed to my personal aesthetic of computing (textual). And that viewpoint turned out to be the most myopic possible in terms of predicting what would actually happen.
If I predict something then almost certainly it will not occur.
Personal identification via the internet would be more streamlined - basically government backed digital is cards.
Windows would rule - more or less.
Usenet and IRC would be things.
The big issue was not understanding the importance of ads. Or the impact. We imagined the web would oriented towards machines talking to machines.
But machines don’t consume ads. So APIs are second class citizens.
We also expected a lot more offshoring.
This just gave me the most wonderful bad idea ever.
Java is a thing. Hypertext isn’t going anywhere. Open standards are … well … there.
I was quite young at the time writing file sharing and chat network applications, and did a lot of experiments building WANs for doom. Most things I was interested required single multicast and rebroadcasted packets with low ping time over a fully-decentralized network. Also, tiny bits of mobile code that would load dynamically as you use a network application. Binary serialization versus plaintext. Progressive data loading, especially with fractal image formats. This wasn’t really about the future though; it was how things worked. Looking back, technology was mostly not about how to do things better, it was about raw horsepower to do things quickly and poorly. A lot of things changed with ISPs too, because they started throttling uploads and now mine doesn’t even allow open ports. P2P ping time among neighbors is much longer than cloud ping, which is absurd. A lot of this has to do with security, which is a bigger desk than I thought it would be.
So, I was wrong about a lot of stuff.
I still think there will be a return of peer to peer eventually, since every pocket has a computer capable of computation and bandwidth unimaginable back then. The ultimate form of data privacy is when you control the power plug.
It was a page of text where some words were underlined and blue. And if you clicked on a blue word, it would jump you to a new page before you were even finished reading the first page!
I remember thinking how dumb that was and must be for people with short attention spans. Uninstall and move on. This WWW thing is going nowhere…
I started with symbolic AI: parsers, tree searches, expert systems, logic. Even then it felt like this approach was stuck in a rut. So I changed lanes and studied early ML: decision trees, genetic algo's, nearest neighbours. When I left college SVM's were all the rage.
All that time, neural networks were deemed interesting but unfeasible for anything realistic. Little did we know.
I feel that if I wanted to get back into this field, I might as well start all over again.
This may not apply if you want to create new ML algorithms, but those jobs are rare in any case.
But when I want to university to study CS in 2007 it was just a marginalia.
Some profs would use it for examples, but until Android gave it a second spring in 2010, we mostly used C/C++ and PHP.
Work laptop is a Dell, works fine.
Huh, that's a name I haven't heard in a while.
WSL, on the other hand...
We still build ETL pipelines to process text files into new text files on a single machine like it's 1995. Oh, but it's a virtual machine now. Progress?
And I wouldn't have imagined something as locked up as iOS in my most dystopian nightmares. On the other hand there's Linux and RaspberryPi, which gives me some hope for the future.
I had hoped desktop development would be native compiled RAD tooling similar to Delphi and C++ Builder, the Web would have stayed as interactive documents, all computers would be improved Amiga like experiences and the depency on the CLI would have long been replaced by REPL based environments.
Ah and all modern OSes would be written in memory safe systems programming languages, following the footsteps from Oberon and Modula-3.
Delphi/Lazarus/QtCreator are still some of the best RAD platforms for desktop apps and the idea of being able to easily add abstracted cross platform components that would work with the native frameworks of the platform you're working on was great.
And REPLs really help with development in every capacity that i can think of, be it Python's, Ruby's or now even Java's REPL - heck, even platforms like Repl.it and Jupyter have gotten more popular and I'm all for it.
While web being just documents would be a bit boring, i also feel that it'd be way better for the energy consumption and often the performance and user experience as well. Not every site needs to be a SPA, if you just want to display some content and allow simple interaction.
And personally, memory safety is the way to go for most things! Not having it be at compile time and with zero cost is probably what's keeping us back from adding it to the OS level.
- Grey, so much grey. Backgrounds, buttons, shadows
- Marvel at my FrontPage geocities prowess. <img source=Under construction.gif>
- DHTML
- OS/2 is going to be huge! So much power to be able to multi task
- Eventually everyone will have an AOL account
- Eventually everyone will have a hotmail account
- Access will rule the world. Visual Basic. VBA. Gaudy block colorf UIs will be du jour
- OMG Java Applets ruling the world
- VRML will reduce the need to know html
- COM/COM+ is the future of programs transfering data between components
- Buying more machines and spreading the load, rather than bigger machines will be the way of the future
- Novell Groupwise vs MS Mail
- Netscape should just buy Microsoft
- Borland C/C++ was going to rule the world
- Drag and drop UI designers might someday not screw up at the faintest hint of advanced layout (and even might get fast eventually)
- Windows would "Beat" Macs
- Linux will eventually get to be mainstream (desktop)
- ColdFusion will be the fastest / most secure server product
- Having opinions on Lycos / Altavista / Yahoo Google
- Everyone will want to run their own home squid server to make things faster
- someday programs would be big enough to come on multiple disks
- someday programs would be big enough to come on multiple CDs
- Neuromancer / matrix / shadowrun style human computer interaction would come true in the 2000s
- Human computer interactions would tend towards mostly speech / audio rather than qwerty
- jQuery accordions will rule the world
- XHMTL will be the new hotness
- XML will save the world from incompatible data and save so much time
- Source control might someday not screw up XML / UI design files
From the perspective of early-90s, I was all-in on Plan 9 and expected to see a lot more influence from it. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, with a few exceptions (/proc).
Obviously, this happens now, but I think it will become more pervasive and many more programmers will find the pattern incorporated into their daily work stream. I see the act of programming becoming the human guiding the computer to write the programs and the human validates it.
I could be way off. I’d have bet anything in ‘94 that Beck would be a one hit wonder.
I still think it can be a benefit, but it will be a battle against our dark natures.
If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed.
[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/104365/Feature_The_Trans...
I thought, in the future, everybody has a computer so it will be a part of basic literacy. Most of our generation will be obsolete because we can't stand a chance against people who all had computers in their home at their birth.
Then, the smartphone was invented and most people were just satisfied with that. Now there is even less people who know how to use the keyboard than our generation. No matter how hard you try, you can't beat the efficiency of keyboard by palm-size touch screen input device on writing.
In the late 1990s to 2000s, there were so many personal text web sites, public forums and chats in my language, Japanese. Now it's all gone. There is no place in the modern Internet I can enjoy serious text-based communication in Japanese. Because, everyone use the smartphone now and it's so inefficient to write a serious text with it.
I also didn't anticipated the huge rise of SaaS. A software that depends remote server to function. I was the believer of P2P technology in 2000s. I believed future network will work on top of P2P mesh network. It failed for various reasons but mostly too inefficient to scale.
Then I see the rise of cryptocurrency. It's horrible. Nobody really cares about the technology. People relies on SaaS wallet service rather than hosting full node. It's the worst hybrid of server-client and P2P. Inefficient and still has authority. NFT... it doesn't even host data in the blockchain! TITAN... it's not a stablecoin. It's just a ponzi-scheme-coin.
I hate the smartphone. But right now, it's really hard to avoid programming job that doesn't involve the smartphone. Even if I don't directly need to deal with it, it still indirectly support the smartphone, further helping the spread of inefficient input device for the writing.
I lost all hope for the future right now. It will be even more orwellian world. Most of the computation will be done in the server side and our computer is mere thin-client to the server. Everything is censored and regulated. I wouldn't surprise we lost the ability to write freely.
1. Smart, well-meaning people see a problem, and try to craft a solution.
2. Bad actors completely ignore these good intentions and use the new invention for money and power, harming or exploiting the general population in the process.
This isn't to say progress is never made, but the lion's share of the benefits of any new tech always ends up going right back to the rich and powerful that didn't need it in the first place.
I wasn't a programmer in the 90's, but I did grow up then, and into the hacker culture of the 00s. Looking back, I feel comradeship for the radicals in the 60s. A revolution was in the air, things were going to change! And then it all petered away to nothing.
Smart, well-meaning people constantly dream of freeing everyone: from poverty, or political oppression, or ideological entanglement. One more advance, one more theory or piece of tech and then we'll have it! But the general populace will never be free, because they don't want to be. On an unconscious level, they desire their cage. Freedom is scary and uncomfortable. That's why smartphones replaced PCs, and why software and the web became a closed, user-hostile morass. Most people do not want the power to self-actualize. They just want to be kept comfortable until they die.
If you mean forums in the vein of Ayashii World, they still exist in the form of 2channel/Futaba. Unless you mean something else.
We had search back in the 90s. Archie, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, etc. But Google brought better ... advertising.
What did I expect? I expected hardware to get better. I didn't expect the phone to be so dominant. The iPhone 12 to someone from the 90s might as well be a Cray tricorder.
Hardware is a LOT better now. Dunno if software is that different. JITs are crap; they re-invent the same thing over and over. Linux re-invents what VMS and other commercial operating systems have already done. Most progress has been either hardware or enabled by hardware.
Did not see the workstation companies going away so fast
Disk storage and networking got really, really cheap
Did not expect such fast mobile phones (cpu and bandwidth wise)
The biggest advances have been distributed version control and dependency management systems.
I was expecting Guile to supplant Perl and Python, and for us all to benefit from the greater reach a Lisp could give us. What we got was motherfucking JavaScript as far as the eye can see, and development processes that hobble productivity so that companies can keep hiring programmer-clerks in legion strength and the executives remain unthreatened.
This was definitely a common vision. Being able to attach machines together ubiquitously. We would be able to have a room of multiple computers, as well as computers over the network, all working as one machine; sharing peripherals, audio-visual inputs and outputs, CPU, storage, etc. And it could all be used by multiple people at once. There would be no walled gardens required to share my screen with someone else across the world, or play the same music from every device.
I though VB would grow and mature with building UIs and backing with more robust code, but it just kind of petered out.
If anything iOS storyboards attempted to bring that idea back.
I did not see infrastructure as code being a thing.
Then I would be wrong again, because I would have thought IPv6 would be everywhere...
Or maybe TCP/IP was simply too entrenched. Even IPv6 has been unable to replace IPv4.
Interstingly, I absolutely didn't see the web coming. I was very interested in BBS'es and Minitel (France) but I didn't connect the dots until I heard of the Amazon and FaceBook and Google which made it big.
But TBH, I didn't see how transformational was computing. Most of the revolutions that came, I saw them as mere gadgets (including the mobile phone), or funny things to do. It's only very late that I understood the potential.
The only things I saw right were : Linux will eat everything (not because of hindsight, just because I wanted it to be :-)) and I saw that independent gaming would come to life when tools would be cheaper (and I was spot on).
My third prediction was : computing will become invisible and ubiquitous (c'mon one has to carry a computer in its pocket all of the time ? tss...). This has yet to realize :-) Maybe with 5G ? :-)
I was also fortunate enough to learn FP back then and it allowed me to see the future of many programming languages.
But overall, I was "inside" the computer and I didn't realize how much it'd change things and how much it'd change itself.
In the early 2000s I remember UBUBU which basically was a customizable 3D solar system cover for your desktop + internet links. I found it pretty cool, the possibility of rose-coloured glasses aside.
And I kept arguing that in a decade and a half, there would be a consolidated monolith and individuals would loose power for a long time to come.
Whenever there is a power tool, expect the power hungry to want to control it. My personal motto. Proves right every time.
But I digress.
Looking back on the three decades since I graduated college in '90 (with CompSci as one of my 3 majors), there were three things which I saw as big game-changers, and became both a user and ardent evangelist for: the TCP/IP Internet, Linux, and Free/Open Source.
Today, it's easy to think of these as a given. But in the 90's they were not, with many battles fought, the outcome of which was not always clear, not always successful. Competing protocols, OS', applications and platforms, business interia and ignorance (not in the negative sense, but unaware/uneducated), and commercial companies protecting revenue flow ("No one ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Novell/Oracle").
I figured that once MLMs could be automated they would replace advertising. Folks would make money connecting each other to products and services through a kind of generic MLM network. Word-of-mouth on steroids. Heck, I still think it could work...
What else?
Flying cars, and flying cities (see Bucky's Cloud Nine), fusion power and atomic tools, robots that could wash dishes and do the laundry, factories that build and delivery whole houses (Bucky again: Dymaxion Home), arcologies (ecologically harmonious mega-cities designed and built as single buildings, Paolo Soleri), Moonbase ("Welcome to Moonbase" by Ben Bova), and those are just the plausible things, linear projections of the capabilities on hand. Not even talking about nanotech, longevity drugs, elctrogravity, etc.
- - - -
It's much easier to think of things that did happen that I never expected. The first major divergence was Twitter. I don't think anyone predicted Twitter. Then there's Facebook. If you could travel in time to, say, the 80's or a littler earlier and you tried to explain FB to people they would think you were stark raving mad. "Put every detail of your life in the hands of some corporation? A voluntary spy network beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi or Gestapo? Yeah right." But here we are... I never thought JS would still be with us, let alone turd-polished to such a gloss. People spreading lies and misinformation, that's not what the internet was invented for. It was supposed to put the world's information at your finger tips, not be a mighty bullshit engine. "Phones" that excoriate minds, no one predicted that (except the Church of the Subgenius: the "white stone" came as prophesized.)
This is happening now with crypto and the DeFi space. Products create tokens and the users hold it to be able to use some of the functions which drives the price of the token up and the developers profit.
I thought Java applets (those things you'd embed in a webpage) were hot stuff that would completely reshape the Web someday, but they managed to effectively die before the proprietary Flash. I thought Java as a server language was doomed for performance reasons, but that turned out to be just fine. Basically I completely misunderstood where Java was going.
The expectations around smart home stuff were way off too. E.g. expectations were more along the lines of your house reminding you to go buy toilet paper. What we got was the ability to ask a hockey puck to buy some more when we notice ourselves running low, if you can get past the privacy concerns.
“Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array<int> on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and [MSFT] didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.
The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable.”
Did anybody have 5 Ghz as the "max" cpu frequency on their bingo cards?
Actually, I remember touring an Intel fab. around 99/00. The guide (an engineer) was pretty sold they were "going to soon max out silicon for CPUs and have to move to germanium" based chips. (Apparently it's too expensive to this day.)
Older, I seem to remember Feynman being pretty optimistic about quantum computers? But that might just have been my takeaway.
First, accessible files would become so numerous that no one would be able to navigate them sensibly with the tools that we had. We would drown in a sea of random gratuitous data.
Second, user interfaces would tend toward a swamp of accidental complexity unless someone made it their business to compete on the basis of superior user experience, based on sound UX research.
Third, unless we could figure out a framework for individuals to own and control their own data, everything would end up owned and controlled by large, faceless institutions with no accountability, and regular people would be reduced to serfs with no effective control of their own data.
I wrote an email about these predictions and circulated it at Apple, trying to get someone interested. I tried to pitch the idea of tackling these problems head-on.
Nobody bit.
Partly that's because I'm not a great salesman. I lack the absolute conviction and the necessary zeal.
Partly it's because I was a minor cog in a large machine.
Partly it's because Apple was in a death spiral at that moment, and didn't have a lot of attention to spare for grand visions of the future.
I had worked for a couple of years on Apple's Newton project, then at NeXT. My expectations of the future arose from stuff I saw while working on those projects. Both Newton and NeXT tried really hard to make user experiences that were natural and comfortable and productive. Both were concerned with trying to connect people using ubiquitous networking.
Both succeeded in no small measure, but both also exposed problems that didn't become visible until you started connecting everything together and trying to design interfaces to help people make sense of it all.
I didn't sell my pitch to anybody, and neither did anybody else. Instead, I think we more or less got the dystopia I was afraid of.
Instead companies created an endless churn of features, rewrote everything because fixing the old problems seemed too difficult (hence inventing endless new problems), hacked new languages for convenience (and to create lock-in) then rediscovered why all that complexity was in the old languages, security was ignored, everyone built new code layered on top of the old stuff we hacked instead of fixing the old code, and everyone switched to commodity hardware creating a race to the bottom driven by low cost.
I've been expecting computing infrastructure to crumble for many years. I think the many modern problems with computing and networks, security in particular but also reliability, indicate it is starting to happen. It will take decades to fix.
Part of the problem seems to be the limited lifespan of people. The old engineers retire and are replaced by the young and a lot of hard won knowledge is lost. Books and the code itself pass on some of that knowledge but it is incomplete (or ignored because who wants to spend the time? We need something new to sell in three months.)
The latest IDE's are certainly doing more of this with code highlighting and autocompletion, but IMHO it could still be easier for coders to more visually annotate and document code.
Much later I discovered things like Ruby on Rails and Django. I switched to emacs and most others switched to editors like vim and VS Code. And things are just generally so much better now. A lot of the things I imagined would be possible back then actually happened.
What I got wrong was how popular the internet would become and what it would be used for. Back then it was mainly a space for geeks. Sure there were a few non-geeks doing internet shopping even back then, but anyone contributing to the internet was more of a geek. There were no girls on the internet. Anonymity was default. While, of course, there was a person behind each handle, it was no concern who they were in meatspace. On the Internet, everyone was equal. Anyone could be anything. Like Neo in the Matrix. That all changed with social media and the big corps decided they wanted to tie us to meatspace IDs. Everyone joined and they brought their meatspace bullshit with them. I didn't see that coming.
Accessing was a nightmare. I miss those simpler days.
We were migrating it to a Sun 690MP running SunOS. So, for the end users of PNMS, we got to try different ways of getting them acccess. DOS/Windows and packet drivers, Sun X-Terminals, Workstations, etc. The DOS and Windows experiences were buggy and generally lousy for the end users. The Sun xterms and workstations were great, but crazy expensive. So I was able to sell the otherwise stodgy management on Linux. Slackware, specifically, in the Linux kernel 0.99-1.x days.
Linux was still buggy at the time, but if you used the right hardware, and rebooted at night, the end users didn't notice much of the issues.
So, after getting it all working, it was interesting to me that a one-man show OS was working better and/or cheaper than what the industry leads could offer. I knew it would go somewhere.
Similar for the web. This was at a US military base, so they had access to the internet. I was given a Linux PC and modem to take home for on-call, so we had internet at the house. I remember showing my wife the very early Pizza Hut website where people in one city in California could order pizza on the site. She didn't get it, perhaps because she's very outgoing and the phone seemed natural. Being more of an introvert, though, I did get it, and assumed the web would be important. Though, I didn't predict how important.
I also made a lot of utilities for end users, and presumed that Tcl/Tk would take over the world. That was after struggling with X11, Athena, etc. That prediction didn't pan out. But Ousterhout later invented RAFT, which is sort of eclipsing Tcl now.
My dad has told me so many stories about how amazing those Sun workstations were. I think his university got them his junior or senior year, and they were the killer machines. Sometimes I wish I could've been programming in that era, but other times I think about how awesome it is that I can compile my code in under a minute.
Wish someone had told me, "Startups are fun, but look at how few of them make a buck. Be a dev, but focus on enterprise and public sector services..." As someone who likes making money, probably just as much if not more than solving problems... like happy for successes with startups in my 20s but I don't think it's something anyone should count on. Look for a nice fat enterprise / government contract. Buy yourself nice toys. Don't waste your time on projects that can't self-fund day 1.
Another: There was always this idea that in the future, applications would be built to run on the database, such as with stored procedures. Obviously, this was widely done, and continues to be done, but it never really matured in the way we expected. There is still a big gap in tooling to make this easy.
This is also related to the ideas we had back then about object persistence. One day, we imagined, we would just manipulate objects in memory, and all of the concerns about persisting those changes, including making it performant, would be taken care of.
Also, transactional memory was surely going to be the norm, whether in software or hardware.
I also thought we'd see new paradigms in GUI and desktop design take over, probably involving 3D.
Everything related to how the internet has developed has been both awe inspiring and deeply disappointing.
In a way, this has occurred. The Microsoft Bob, full-virtual-environment sort of 3D is not popular but modern UI's are generally hardware accelerated and use lightweight 3D effects to enhance UX, whereas this was very uncommon in the 1990's.
win32 applications, linux gui applications.
java applets for rich UIs for websites (javascript was a joke).
Like a number of other commenters mentioned, folks like me who were in STEM majors all had to learn how to code in some form or another, though I don't think I ever took any classes as such. A popular joke then: "what do mechanical engineers do when they graduate?" "they learn to code and become programmers"
In my case, I had a part-time job in a lab writing programs in C++ to get various lab instruments to be remote controllable from a terminal and had to learn on the job how to do it. One of the professors in the lab gave me a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C" to help me with the C++ code I was writing. It didn't help at all!
I was also part of the generation that learned basic programming on a TRS-80 (aka "trash-80") in BASIC, then in HS some Pascal and FORTRAN in an informal computer club. My family never owned a home computer, but the school had a bunch of windowsOS machines curious students could play with.
Looking back now, it seems like I was really primed to be part of one of the first waves of professional programmers, and indeed a number of my friends did go that route. But by the time I graduated from university, I kind of hated coding! Recall that in the 90s there was no stack overflow, no google, no way to see how others might have solved the problem. If you couldn't figure out how to get something to work, you had to just grind away at it no matter how long it took.
At the time, I honestly thought whatever future there might be for professional programming I sure didn't want to be a part of it. And I also didn't think it would take over the world like it did. I left uni and I spent a number of years traveling abroad and teaching ESL before dusting off my coding skills and getting a series of coding jobs in various industries.
I am extraordinarily grateful that I learned "the hard way" how to code, but more than once I wish I had gotten my degree in CS instead of ME.
One of the biggest reasons for the miss was I had expected cross-platform app development to become much more mature much more quickly than it actually did. The long persistence of apps that only ran on Windows was something that I didn't expect.
I also didn't expect the fast decline of desktop computers leading to the vendor lock in effect that led to the best laptops tending to either run Windows or Mac OS, further eroding the relevance of Linux not just because Linux didn't ship on those devices but also because it was a second class citizen for drivers.
I also did not expect to be making this post from an Android phone decades later.
We see robots in manufacturing plants (e.g. cars), but not too many visible when you walk down the street. Of course, they're there, but hidden inside various normal looking objects. Automatic street lights, driverless trains, boom gates for public transport.
We got the opposite on all fronts.
When I went to university (2013-16ish) there were still a couple of professors clinging to the idea that everyone would see the light and semantic web would be broadly implemented, but aside from that everyone else I've ever discussed it with has considered it a dead or vapourware technology. I am curious as to whether it was seen as viable or realistic back in the day, or just a pipe dream.
The idea of having semantic data alongside of your presentation data (embedding RDF statements in your web pages) is and always was stupid. They are separate concerns, and should live entirely separate from each other. You're not going to have content authors embedding machine-readable knowledge in with the human presentation; who the hell is going to bother with that kind of tedious, annoying work when their audience is humans?
However, data warehouses that can be automatically mined by smart machines for meaning is huge. It's still going to be awhile before our systems are powerful enough and there's data enough to make this worthwhile, but at our rate of data generation I doubt it'll be much longer before we simply NEED these kinds of connecting and semantic technologies in order to handle the ever-growing mountain of data.
I put the relationship type into my data format specifically as a bet on this: https://concise-encoding.org/#relationships
We still don't have any sizeable shared ontologies, but that's to be expected since only researchers are interested in it at this too-early stage. Once the shit hits the fan so-to-speak, we'll see some company or group build a serious reference ontology in record time.
The things I did see were kind of right there. You could see Linux taking shape - and the biggest driver there, IMHO, was that Unix as an OS removed a lot of constraints Windows and macOS had at the time, that Linux was free & open, and that the entire teaching environment used some form of Unix.
You could see that Internet thing take shape. (I'm still cranky with myself I didn't see it enough, so I turned down several excellent startup options). A commercial future was still dubious. At least to me, but then, I'm not a futurist ;)
You could believe, for a glorious moment, that open sharing was an unalloyed good, and privacy wasn't necessary. (That lasted about 18 months, but for a brief moment in time, it felt amazing)
Most of us spent a lot of time making fun of early video sharing attempts, because we could do math. (Bandwidth made it impossible). We were less good in estimating how much bandwidth would increase. Also, the funniest early attempt was Oracle, because Oracle had a reputation even back then.
The one thing I did "see" early on was that single-core was headed to the dustbin. Mostly because I had the fortune to work with a bunch of people who worked on transputers. A dead-end tech by itself, but it made a very clear point that networked systems of cores are extremely powerful.
Looking back, what strikes me most is how little has changed. We had passionate editor wars. We had OS fanboys. We had our own overhyped and underused lazy FP language (Miranda, back then). We still applied functional principles, just not in that language. Lisp was supposed to be cool, but nobody used it. Nobody wrote FORTRAN, but we'd have been doomed without numeric libraries from FORTRAN. C (and figments of C++) were the workhorse for heavy tasks. The lighter lifting, you did in a scripting language (Perl), because ain't nobody got time for C++. GUIs were derided as fat and bloated, and people in general clamored for the good old times of fast and light software. Programs were at the outer limit of complexity we could manage.
And we're going to find out just how short attention spans can become and how information overload interferes with memory formation.
Just when I started to think that will never happen, it happened;-)
NCSA Mosaic, meh. That will never catch on.
All of the 1990's "Desktop" software projects that failed horribly. I use way better versions of these today on the web and they actually work -- success! I am still not happy with the NCSA Mosaic user interface.
In the 80s, I dreamed of a 1 million pixel monitor: 1024 x 1024. It's 2021, and I am typing on a 1366x768 latop - big fail.
I knew video game worlds would get bigger and more realistic than the wire renders of the BBC Elite, but I didn’t expect them to be full of loot boxes and other people.
Sure, the web is infinitely more useful today, but I feel like a corporate web slave when using it ... dodging trackers, VPN's myself against XYZ ... etc.
I also thought that RAD tools would continue to stay popular.
Personally I still think that stuff will happen, it's just delayed by people's stupidity/ignorance.
Also discussed was remote storage, globally available file shares.
It looks like this is happening with what we now call "Cloud Computing."
The Internet would be a lot less centralized than it has become with a lot more peer-to-peer traffic.
The Internet would be very disruptive to political systems and large corporations, promoting a lot more small scale DIY and anarchistic type stuff. (Standard issue 90s techno-libertarianism... we did not understand network effects.)
I thought the Internet would decentralize us physically too, making it possible to do the same work from some 'holler in West Virginia as the middle of Manhattan. (I still don't count this one out. COVID pushed us a little further in this direction. This is more a cultural thing than a technical thing, and culture changes slowly.)
C and C++ would be dead. Nobody would write in memory-unsafe languages anymore and garbage collection would be ubiquitous. We'd probably have type systems that caught a lot of bugs too. Rust is finally delivering on the latter, so this may eventually come to pass.
CPU frequencies would continue increasing, or would at least level off at a higher frequency than they have. I would have guessed 10ghz or so since beyond that the speed of light vs the size of the die becomes an issue.
AI would remain very far off. I did not imagine self-driving cars until ~2050 or so. The 90s was still the "AI winter."
Apple would be dead by now.
X86 would be dead by now. I never would have imagined it would have been possible to get this kind of performance out of that hairball of an instruction set.
Spinning disk would be dead. (It is on PCs and mobile devices, but I mean everywhere.)
I didn't predict mobile at all. I would have said such devices are too small to have good UIs. How would you use something with a tiny screen like that for anything but maybe texting?
I thought we'd all have at least a gigabit (full duplex) at home by now.
I was really pessimistic on space, at least in the near-mid term future. I didn't expect to see humans still in space by 2010-2020, let alone something like SpaceX.
I was really pessimistic on energy. By now I would have predicted we'd be well into a global depression brought on by fossil fuel exhaustion. We'd be deploying nuclear fission as fast as possible to keep the grid up, but cars and airplanes would become extremely expensive to operate (thinking ~$20/gal gas). We would have reduced mobility but we'd all be connected.
I wasn't concerned about climate change because of course we would run out of cheap fossil fuels before that would become a really big issue.
... can probably think of more.
Doesn't get much more 90s than Bill Gates
https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/The-Road-Ahead-a...
Specifically, I thought languages would be designed around debugging use cases. The fact that we are still using debuggers and loggers and printlns to debug blows my mind.
- Useable VRML (Minority Report was 2002!)
- CPUs that could directly run Java bytecode (Sun never shipped it, but everything had a "powered by Java" sticker on it back then)
I still have dreams about being able to point a cell phone at a physical object (television, fast food restaurant, car etc), and being presented with an AR GUI that controls that device. I suspect this is where things will head with Apple's AR headset. This is not a new idea really... in the mid to late 90s there were specialty AR headsets which could read QR codes and look up schematics and overlay them for you, But it was literally, a 486 that sat on your head.
Other things that blindsided me... The current advances in AI. I worked at an AI lab in the late 1990s. Our pride and joy was a demo that could, given a dataset of 500 images, differentiate between a few classes of images... really simple stuff like, flowers, animals, landscapes, machines. The images were like 48x48 and it took weeks of training on a Sun Ultra workstation.
And this was an interesting lesson for me. To quote a friend of mine who was/is an AI researcher--"These are the same algorithms we used 25 year ago. It's the computation that has changed." He had an idea to make a botany app which could tell what kind of plant what was based on a picture of the leaves-- this was 12 years ago at least. I told him it was impossible because I couldn't fathom how it could work. But he was right of course and now I believe there are such apps.
Back at that university in 2000, I had an array of Sun A1000's-- like 70 disks in total to make 1TB of storage. It cost the university 250k. Today, I have about 100TB of storage at my house personally, and it cost me... 5k maybe? Similarly, my cheap graphics card has more power than every computer on earth before at least the mid 90s.
This is to say, when the SCALE of things change, your capabilities change a lot. This is something that worries me about Google/Apple etc. They have access to oceans of compute power/storage. How could a small company ever compete with that? I would like to get back into AI as I always found it fascinating-- but how can I even learn when access to resources like that cost billions of dollars? I can't even get a decent video card or RAM for my computer at the moment.
We also seem to be at the end of this era of ever-increasing capabilities. We will need a big breakthrough to keep up the pace, or we will have to get much better at using resources.
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I'm also very surprised by how little what I consider fundamentals of CS matter in the day-to-day. I probably had the last of the classical engineering educations-- full tour of calculus, physics, chemistry, partial tours of like EE, chip design, automata, relational algebra, to mention nothing of the humanities.
When I was a team lead at a large corp, the young folks would be impressed about how I would use an idea from another discipline to solve an engineering problem-- but I think the era of that kind of guy is over. I think what's important now is speed and loyalty. I watch in amusement as the JavaScript community discovers stuff that has been known to the wider world for decades.
Regarding loyalty-- I was raised with the Scientific mindset-- that our commitment was to the truth. A colleague of mine once worked for Sandia National Laboratories and he jokingly suggested that they falsify the results of an experiment-- and he was pulled aside and told something to the effect of, "We are scientists, we do not do that. Don't even joke about it."
I feel like that mindset is absent, even in science let alone business. The most important skill is loathing yourself while pretending that whatever bullshit, alternate version or reality your bosses boss is forcing on you is great.
This is something I could never adapt to. Working 60 hours weeks simply because of bad management. In my corporate gigs, it was always the same-- when a project went well it was because the manager did a good job. When a project went poorly-- it was because engineering fucked it up. I've worked on projects where 9 months out we warned management about XYZ. They ignored it, then blamed us when what we said was going to happen, happened. I think engineers are ill-equipped to defend themselves in these political environments.
In short, I never imagined most of my jov would be going to meetings and lobbying for common sense.
Good grief
I was kinda hoping we'd have ubiquitous flying cars by now, but hey Uber right...lol
I thought that the internet would kill the tabloid press (I am in the UK), and give the public better quality news and information. Instead, the internet became the tabloid.
I thought that it would be the "other guys" who would first leverage the internet as a political platform. People descended from 90s hacktivists, DMT-eating civil libertarians and the like. The rise of internet driven populism was a surprise to me.
I thought that in the future I would own an SGI home computer with superpowered custom chips, or something like a Playstation 2 with an os and keyboard. That is, something highly integrated like the home computers were.
I kind of miss the immersive experience of working with a computer where the whole thing is a unified design and you have a couple of big books which tell you everything you'll need to know to program them, and all the layers of abstraction are accessible and make sense to the programmer-user.
Back then, I thought that the computers of the future would be more profound rather than merely more complex. That they would still be knowable to the lone hacker, only they would demand more from them. Instead we have these huge complexes of ordinary complexity, reminiscent of power station piping diagrams, that we work on in teams as bureaucrats of abstraction. Of course, back then I was a kid, in love with the mystique of computers, there was a lot I romanticized, and a lot I didn't know.
I thought there would be more visual tools for programming, things derived from NeXT Interface Builder, Visual Basic and multimedia authoring systems that people used to use to make CD ROMs and information kiosks in the 90s. And I thought that the development process would be more integrated. We wouldn't be bothering with stacks of batch-mode build tools and things like that, and it would be relatively easy to open a window or play a sound in a high level language without having to do C bindings to third party cross-platform toolkits etc.
I didn't think programming would be replaced with graphical tools, I thought it would be augmented by them, in a unified, ergonomic package.
I thought VR would get going sooner than it did. I was a big fan of Howard Rheingold's 1991 book "Virtual Reality" (a great guide to early VR) and got to try it out in 1993 at a computer exhibition. I used to fantasize about going to VR arcades and playing flight simulators with a bunch of people. Now I do it at home with IL2: Great Battles.
One prediction I got right was shaders on graphics cards. Back in the late 90s I was a user of BMRT, a shareware Renderman-compliant raytracer which introduced me to the idea of programmable shaders. I figured it was only a matter of time before they ended up in consumer hardware, and my ears pricked up when the author of BMRT went to work for Nvidia.